Fan’s Campaign May Take Seattle Monorail on Ride Into Future

This town already looks like Tomorrowland to tourists, with its Saturn-ringed Space Needle forever readying for blastoff and the elevated Monorail humming into a new day.

Both are holdovers from the “Century 21” World’s Fair of 1962. Now the futuristic kitsch may get richer as a cabdriver’s mission to expand the monorail appears to be succeeding despite the best efforts of some public officials to derail it.

“People have looked up for years and seen this thing working and flying above their heads. They never hear the monorail reported in traffic reports or disaster reports, and they’ve said, ‘Why not extend this thing?’ ” said Dick Falkenbury, who drives a Red Top taxi by night and sits on the new Elevated Transit Committee, which will oversee a $6-million monorail study ordered by a citizens’ initiative that passed in November.

The initiative campaign was run on less than a shoestring budget, with most signatures collected at unstaffed petition boards on street corners. The boards’ message--”We Said Monorail!”--referred to the City Council’s repeal this year of a 1997 initiative that ordered an X-shaped, 40-mile monorail expansion but was vague about paying for it.

“People were so angered by the arrogance of the city government saying we didn’t know what we had voted for. That was one of the reasons we worked so hard and did everything we could to get on the November ballot,” said Peter Sherwin, who headed the new initiative campaign.

The current monorail is almost exclusively a tourist attraction. It runs nine-tenths of a mile between a downtown shopping plaza and the Seattle Center. On the way, it zooms over rooftops and the increasingly snarled traffic, cuts through the heart of the multihued, curved-metal Experience Music Project and halts in the shadow of the Space Needle.

“It’s awesome,” Britta Volz, a Washington, D.C., high school student writing a term paper on transportation, said after making her first trip. “It was neat to look down on the city. And it couldn’t get into accidents or anything.”

“It’s a lot faster than I thought it would be,” said David Latherton of Gloucester, England. “It’s nicer and a lot less crowded” than London’s Underground subway system.

Judy Nicastro, a City Council member and one of the few early supporters of Falkenbury’s idea, said the monorail is exciting technology.

“It’s aboveground, which I like because I’m a woman and I’m always concerned about going underground. It gets people off the roads. Nothing is competing with car traffic or buses or bikes,” she said.

Most city officials have been cool to the campaign, in part because their energy and funding have been consumed by a regional light-rail project and other plans.

The city refused to give the new committee more than a $200,000 initial grant. Nicastro and council member Nick Licata proposed a $4-million monorail study in May, but couldn’t get the votes. Last February, Mayor Paul Schell helped persuade light-rail agency Sound Transit to drop a proposed $50,000 grant to the committee.

“Going forward with $50,000 to study the monorail as the only option wouldn’t have been wise when lots of other technologies were available,” including street-level trolleys under study for the downtown core, mayoral spokesman Dick Lily said.

Now, however, the mayor supports the new $6-million study and believes that voters have made clear they want monorail fully considered, Lily said.

A new monorail would not be an actual extension of the existing line, which uses clunky, concrete-pillar construction and is showing its age. Instead, metal posts and slimmer construction like that on a Las Vegas project underway or monorails in Japan and Europe are envisioned.

Cost estimates for Las Vegas’ system have been as high as $100 million per mile, but Sherwin said some consultants have estimated that Seattle could build for $40 million per mile.

“I’m convinced that monorail really doesn’t cost significantly more than light rail,” he said. “The whole point of this initiative is to get the numbers and stop all the endless speculation.”

The committee has two years to complete its study and put a firm cost estimate before the voters.

“I would absolutely ride it,” said Joel Ohringer, a computer systems analyst who was one of the few locals riding the monorail on a recent weekday. He was going to see his wife, who works at the Seattle Center. “A lot of people don’t like taking buses. This is quiet, and it’s quick.”